planning-and-task-breakdown

Breaks work into ordered tasks. Use when you have a spec or clear requirements and need to break work into implementable tasks. Use when a task feels too large to start, when you need to estimate scope, or when parallel work is possible.

Quality

72%

Does it follow best practices?

Impact

—

No eval scenarios have been run

Securityby

Passed

No known issues

Optimize this skill with Tessl

npx tessl skill review --optimize ./skills/planning-and-task-breakdown/SKILL.md

Quality

Content

77%

Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.

This is a strong instructional skill with excellent actionability and workflow clarity. The concrete templates, sizing guidelines, and checkpoint patterns give Claude everything needed to produce high-quality task breakdowns. The main weakness is moderate verbosity — the 'Common Rationalizations' table and some explanatory text add motivational content that doesn't change Claude's behavior, and the document could benefit from splitting into a concise overview with supporting reference files.

Suggestions

Remove or significantly trim the 'Common Rationalizations' table — it's motivational rather than instructional and Claude doesn't need convincing to follow its own skill instructions.

Consider extracting the Plan Document Template and Task Structure template into a separate TEMPLATES.md reference file to keep the main skill leaner.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Conciseness	The skill is generally well-structured but includes some unnecessary content that Claude would already know. The 'Common Rationalizations' table is motivational rather than instructional, and sections like 'When NOT to use' and 'Red Flags' overlap somewhat. The dependency graph ASCII art and examples are valuable, but the overall document could be tightened by ~20-30%.	2 / 3
Actionability	The skill provides concrete, copy-paste-ready templates for task structure, plan documents, and checkpoints. The task sizing table with specific file counts, the vertical vs horizontal slicing examples, and the explicit markdown templates give Claude everything needed to produce actionable plans immediately.	3 / 3
Workflow Clarity	The 5-step planning process is clearly sequenced with explicit validation checkpoints after every 2-3 tasks. The checkpoint template includes specific verification criteria, there's a feedback loop (review with human before proceeding), and the final verification checklist ensures completeness before implementation begins.	3 / 3
Progressive Disclosure	The content is well-organized with clear headers and logical sections, but it's a monolithic document (~200 lines) with no references to external files. The task sizing guidelines, plan template, and parallelization guidance could be split into separate reference files. However, since no bundle files exist, this is somewhat expected.	2 / 3
	Total	10 / 12 Passed

Description

67%

Based on the skill's description, can an agent find and select it at the right time? Clear, specific descriptions lead to better discovery.

The description does well on completeness by clearly stating both what the skill does and when to use it with multiple explicit trigger conditions. However, it lacks specificity in the concrete actions it performs (e.g., does it produce a numbered list, a dependency graph, time estimates?) and could benefit from more natural trigger terms that users commonly use when requesting task breakdown.

Suggestions

Add more specific concrete actions the skill performs, e.g., 'creates ordered task lists with dependencies, estimates effort, identifies parallelizable work streams'.

Expand trigger terms to include common user phrases like 'plan', 'decompose', 'work breakdown', 'task list', 'project planning', 'subtasks', or 'implementation plan'.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Specificity	The description names the domain (task breakdown/planning) and mentions some actions like 'break work into implementable tasks' and 'estimate scope', but it doesn't list multiple concrete specific actions like creating task lists, defining dependencies, generating subtasks, or producing ordered deliverables.	2 / 3
Completeness	Clearly answers both 'what' (breaks work into ordered tasks) and 'when' with explicit triggers ('when you have a spec or clear requirements', 'when a task feels too large to start', 'when you need to estimate scope', 'when parallel work is possible').	3 / 3
Trigger Term Quality	Includes some natural terms like 'spec', 'requirements', 'break work into tasks', 'estimate scope', and 'parallel work', but misses common variations users might say such as 'plan', 'decompose', 'subtasks', 'project planning', 'work breakdown', 'task list', or 'roadmap'.	2 / 3
Distinctiveness Conflict Risk	The description is somewhat specific to task decomposition from specs/requirements, but could overlap with general project planning, project management, or task management skills. The phrase 'breaks work into ordered tasks' is moderately distinctive but not sharply differentiated.	2 / 3
	Total	9 / 12 Passed

Validation

100%

Warnings & errors only

Checks the skill against the spec for correct structure and formatting. All validation checks must pass before discovery and implementation can be scored.

Validation — 11 / 11 Passed

Validation for skill structure

No warnings or errors.

Repository: addyosmani/agent-skills
Commit: 5e262b2

Reviewed: 1 day ago

Table of Contents

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